Grind of the Lions

Day 391

Almost every time I've played Final Fantasy Tactics, I've fielded a full roster of generics plus Ramza. I felt like this gave me a lot more creative freedom with my characters in the end and it also felt beyond cheap to rely on Orlandeau, whose ridiculous stats and abilities trivialize the rest of the game's content. At the same time, though, I've never used any of the story characters aside from Ramza himself. The first time I ever played the game over ten years ago, I definitely recall using Agrias, Mustadio, and Orlandeau, but no one else. I'm not sure I was even aware of the existence of hidden characters like Reis, Beowulf, or Cloud until many years later--at which point the tradition of using only generics was sort of set in stone for me.

In this particular playthrough of War of the Lions, I've been attempting to make each of my characters as ridiculously strong as possible. For the majority of the game, I've used only generics, but after recruiting Luso, Beowulf, Bathier, Reis, and Construct 8, I've realized there are a lot of characters I've never even tried before and I'd like to experiment with them. The only problem with this is that I've already invested so much time into leveling up my generics. Addison in particular has Black Mage and Knight mastered in preparation for the lofty Dark Knight job and that's certainly not something I'm willing to abandon. My Mystic is somewhat less fleshed out, although I really love the idea of wielding a pole-type weapon with the Samurai's Doublehand support ability. Since poles scale off Magic Attack and Doublehand significantly increases the damage of weapons (at the expense of wielding the weapon with two hands), Mystics are capable of putting out incredibly high damage with basic attacks while still having access to a number of utility spells.

I've considered intentionally killing off a few of my generics and having one of the story characters grab their crystal to inherit their abilities--but I've heard this isn't a foolproof method to retain these abilities as it's somewhat randomly determined which abilities transfer. In addition, the story characters in question would have to have all of the same classes unlocked to inherit those abilities. It would make me feel a lot better if I just took the time to grind these story characters and come up with unique builds for them as well, but it's certainly going to be incredibly time consuming if I choose to do this.

I think I'd be more than willing to experiment if I hadn't already spent so much time on what is essentially the exact same game as what I'm playing right now. War of the Lions does feature a laundry list of improvements to the base game, but in the end the gameplay is identical. My patience only extends so far when it comes to endless grinding. There's a reason I tend to get burned out on Disgaea titles, for instance.